Month: February 2026

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Piano

“Softly spoken, with his broad Tottenham accent sounding as fruitily at odds with the rarefied nature of his music as it ever has, he describes sitting at a piano hitting a single key for days on end, listening intently to the special cadences of the sound draining from a dying string. He will also enthuse about dissonance and Miles Davis and Ravel and Can and John Cage and Ornette Coleman and fail to mention a single other “pop” artist at any stage of our discussion.“ Mark Roland talking to Mark Hollis for Melody Maker, January 1998

‘Piano’ was (deliberately) the last piece of music I ever heard in stereo, that is, with two working ears. Seven years ago now.

What does the world sound like in mono? Non-spatial, directionless; all sounds come from everywhere and nowhere and who-knows-where. This does make a stereo recording mostly redundant. But not in the case of Piano by John Cope for Allinson Brown. A room, Mark Hollis, a piano, and Phill Brown in charge of mic placement. The space is there, all of it, even in mono,  even the air in that room, made audible by the slow fading notes.

Why are those notes so slow? Has Hollis taken his whole ‘silence’ trip too far? Not at all. This was originally recorded for a series of art installations, with Piano being played on a loop in the exhibition space. See, it all makes sense now, doesn’t it? One day soon I will find a gallery to sit in and listen to Piano, just for the vibe.

For now the parks and pathways of my neighbourhood are the visual accompaniment to Piano. Birdsong, summer cicadas and the kids at the school at the end of the street bleed through, filling those long silences with the sounds of life. It’s no accident Hollis mentioned John Cage to Melody Maker.

“There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”
John Cage, speaking about the premiere of 4’33”

Piano – Youtube

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=niUH0MfeGZY&si=Wbi22nbDh5pvtCni

Piano – Bandcamp

https://av1music.bandcamp.com/track/piano-2

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The Daily Planet

 

“Hollis was the singer of Talk Talk, and the only solo album he did was a masterpiece. It was pitched at such a low level you had to bend in to hear it, the same way you had to with Terry back at the Savoy. Hollis was equally seductive.

A band backed Hollis, but barely, like a phantom band, with a series of soft jazz chords, while Hollis sang in a quivering croon. He sounded a bit upset, disconsolate, like he was singing himself to sleep after a particularly trying day. I liked his tone of resignation. I liked the fact that the music was so withdrawn, that it had an inverse power beyond the average rocker. His album was concrete evidence to me that my fresh way of working was right, that quietness could be just as effective as bashing. Quietness was like a person stealing into your room.” – Shayne Carter ‘Dead People I Have Known’

The Daily Planet begins like a person stealing into your room. Atonal random scattered woodwind notes. After what seems like longer than you might expect, the woodwind is joined by the rest of the ‘phantom band’ playing a tuneless melange that eventually coalesces into a complex and delightful composition, almost a dubby waltz if you can believe it. I say ‘dubby’ because down low there is a bassoon refrain- is it a bassoon? I am just guessing, what would I know? – whatever it is, I hear Augustus Pablo in that maybe-bassoon, and once I hear that I can’t unhear it, I don’t want to. I also hear the germ of ARB Section 1 in its wandering start, and its lyrical theme has the vibe of an old ReAction tune. The Daily Planet – stolen from Clark Kent or Arthur Lee? I guess Arthur Lee stole it from Clark Kent. Whichever, Mark Hollis still doesn’t like to read the news.

The lyrics are otherwise as obtuse as ever and include difficult words like rape and pain, but Mark Hollis swallows them into silence or turns them into delicate notes, blurring hardness into soft sound. Another instrument in the phantom band. The Daily Planet is a high point in an already stellar songbook – legitimately a masterpiece. It – and the album – being deleted by the record company after 3 months is just so insulting. No wonder Mr Hollis gave the industry the finger.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=X9fiNS8tKHk&si=Ye8uG-1ku4wbjh3q

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Candy

“Mark has a classic English voice, reminiscent of early Spencer Davis. It’s perfect for the slow numbers like ‘Carolyn’ and ‘Candy’ the latter of which will be the band’s debut single. It’s a sad song that broods and dreams splendidly.” – Vicky Jolly reviewing a very early Talk Talk gig in Sounds, 1982.

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I consider the counterfactual where Talk Talk’s first single was the epic Candy rather than the DOA Mirror Man. I was bummed out when I first read the review above and discovered that they had actually considered Candy as a debut single. I think it would have been great.

By 1982, both songs had been around for a while – in Mark Hollis’s musical world anyway. They were remnants of the ReAction setlist, Mirror Man mostly remade by the new band, Candy much the same as it was when performed by The ReAction. Both songs were recorded for Talk Talk’s first set of demos. The vocal on that demo version of Candy is spectacular – or, should I say, vocals. The harmonies OMG. Who is that? Simon? Paul? Hollis double-tracked? It’s hard to say but it sounds dreamy. In fact, it broods and dreams splendidly.

So why wasn’t it their first single? My guess is that it just fell out of favour. Maybe they (and by ‘they’ I probably mean Mark Hollis, who always appeared to have the last word) didn’t like the production, maybe they were just sick of it, in the way they never seemed to get sick of Talk Talk, the second single. Talk Talk was seemingly played at every gig ever, whereas Candy dropped out of the setlist almost immediately.

Poor Candy. Not only left by the wayside, but unfortunately numbered amongst the songs in the TT catalogue rumoured to be about heroin. Why was this such a recurring theme? Was it an eighties thing? A post punk thing? Why did it attach itself to four handsome young men in white suits? I mean, I hate to even mention it, honestly, because I have no wish to revive that speculation; from this distance I am dumbfounded by it. Maybe it was just the obtuseness of the Hollis lyrics and his vocal tone – ‘What’s that about, then? Sounds sad, maybe drugs? Yeah that works.”

Candy, forever a mystery. But a beautiful mystery.

Candy (demo)https://youtu.be/eEBCAtvKbAk?si=kimq7i1ZsWxjFPFP

Candy – The ReActionhttps://youtu.be/uoPUeEl0lJE?si=9NEMOaRU_0GBOhkT

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New Grass

“A few days after this experience, I was listening to [New Grass] and something sounded familiar. Harris was playing that exact same rhythm on his ride cymbal and snare. But instead of being sonically surrounded by energetic poly-rhythms and call-and-response vocals, his rhythm was inhabiting its own space among languid melodies, a bed of organ tones, and patient vocals. A closer listen revealed that his kick drum was, at times, percolating in syncopation with the ride rhythm and then countering it, much like the way the various rhythms of the African ensemble pull and release against each other. Harris seemed to be doing this in order to divide up the insistent 3/4 time, to reinforce the downbeat of the snare drum. Pushing and pulling the rhythm like this gives the song it’s forward motion but also props up the back beat.

I’m not sure if he was cognisant of the parallels between what he was doing and the ancient rhythms of the Ewe tribe, but it doesn’t matter – what he did was too creatively genuine to be guilty of “exoticism”. It’s completely brilliant, and, in my opinion, one of the best drum performances in rock history. “ – Mike Weis, “Spirit of Talk Talk”, 2012.

I thought I loved the paintings of Roy Lichtenstein but I had only ever seen them reproduced page size so how could I even know? Until last week, when I found myself in a room for the first time ever with an actual Roy Lichtenstein painting. Now I definitely love the paintings of Roy Lichtenstein. It is the scale that makes them make sense. Small, in a book, his paintings appear mechanical, machine made, a screen of dots. But at their true size you can lean in close and see that every single dot is hand painted.

New Grass is a song that wants to keep us at a distance, admiring its incredible beauty, unable to bring the dots into focus. It doesn’t want us to see the brush marks. But do lean in closer for a bit, like Mike Weis did when he noticed the brush marks made by Lee Harris.

New Grass is hard to focus on, isn’t it? Like the faintest stars, the ones you can’t see if you look straight at them. It’s a mirage, a chimera; go now and listen intently to every moment of New Grass. Bet you can’t.

New Grass fan videohttps://youtu.be/BI_c7hflLhY?si=D9EK9PVgYmbkBdVg

Roy Lichtenstein https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/features/roy-lichtenstein-learning-resource